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Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?

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Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?

#231

Post by logfromblammo »

dsp1234 wrote: post #115
TrinaryWorksToo wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about class action? Could you make a class action against those who have sold your information?

A class action is an action where there are a large, possibly unknown, number of plaintiffs suing a single group of named defendants. With the thought process being that if a single case against a named defendant is won, then that same outcome would happen for every other plaintiff, and thus doing it once saves the court time. What you're suggesting is more like a John Doe case where you sue a number of unknown entit…

Couldn't you start a class action against one named defendant, and use the discovery process to uncover all the other unknown-at-the-time-of-filing defendants?

I'm pretty sure that if the named defendant coughs up an NDA that prevents them from disclosing the names of their business associates to a court, the judge is not just going to say, "I'll allow it."

Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?

#232

Post by gcb0 »

smhost wrote: post #211
stevedekorte wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good to know. Let's all start ordering pizza's, etc under random other names. Create a haystack to hide the needle.

A better strat would be if we all agreed on a single name for everyone to use.

easy to filter out

Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?

#233

Post by gcb0 »

jameslk wrote: post #44
JoshTriplett wrote: post #14

If anyone reading this thread is interested: I would pay non-trivial amounts of money on a regular basis for a service that systematically worked to eliminate records like these (and the sources they draw from), as well as chasing down sources of junk mail and the lists they ultimately draw from. The value would depend on effectiveness, and on the degree to which the service clearly reported exactly what they did. Ca…

I've considered working on this problem from a business standpoint, but I couldn't figure out a good business model for it. I don't think too many people will pay a monthly fee to have their information removed from these services. My guess is that they would sign up for a month and after their information has been removed, immediately cancel their subscription until they needed to do it again. And a yearly fee seeme…

why would people pay for the opposite of what they daily work on at Facebook for free: sharing their private life.

the new generation grew up with spam and giving out private info like there's no tomorrow.

I may sound like a pessimist, but try to talk to any 14-16 year old and see for yourself.

Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?

#234

Post by justin66 »

mehrdadn wrote: post #11
pandabear187 wrote: post #3

I have insider knowledge as I used to work for one of these companies. Depending on the product you purchase the data comes from multiple sources. Also these companies have sophisticated machine learning capabilities to build a profile based on various attributes found in seemingly unrelated pieces of data. So the list consists of credit reporting agencies, public records, your online profiles with public access, cou…

Thank you for the reply. Can you actually give some kind of a list though? The entire problem here is everyone explains the how but no one is willing to explain the who . I certainly understand it's "multiple sources", I'm asking who are these sources I keep hearing about. There can't be nearly as many sources as there are sites who buy from them. If you'd like to not name the company you worked for yourself then cou…

> There can't be nearly as many sources as there are sites who buy from them.

Sure there can. The sources include state, county, and local governments. There are a lot of those.

Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?

#235

Post by lithos »

mehrdadn wrote: post #119
cosmie wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every company I know in the space is a company that we've had at least preliminary conversations with (seeing if there's any potential relationship to either purchase from or sell to that company). Just having that conversation required getting a mutual NDA in place, since the conversation involves revealing your capabilities (even if not your sources). And that's assuming you're even aware of all the NDAs your compa…

Okay, I see. But somehow someone in your company found out about them before they could sign mutual NDAs, right? How does that happen? Do you just need a higher-up who's friends with the right people?

Imagine the legal liability you'd incur if the layperson could track the source of inaccurate data, then proved in court it kept them from getting a loan.

Those are provable damages, and maybe slander if they can convince the court they're a publication

Another reason to be NDAed up.

Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?

#236

Post by justin66 »

mehrdadn wrote: post #24
blackbagboys wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such public list. Most of these companies are privately held, their methods are trade secrets, and there is no real form of legal recourse. Your best bet would be to buy a book like this: https://www.amazon.com/Hiding-Internet-Eliminating-Personal-... and follow the recommendations, but even that is only likely to be half-effective. Much of the public information is mined from sources like credit headers,…

> There is no such public list. Most of these companies are privately held, their methods are trade secrets, and there is no real form of legal recourse. How can there not be a public list of these data miners? When e.g. a court needs to control someone's information surely they know who these people are and they can let them know? Is there a secret list in every courthouse or something? Or when someone wants to star…

> When e.g. a court needs to control someone's information surely they know who these people are and they can let them know?

The companies which furnish personal data aggregated from courts are legally required to stay on top of out-of-date records and purge records which are inaccurate. (it would be completely untenable for things to work the other way, with every court and agency which made records available being required to reach out to every recipient of the data. For one thing, in some cases the data can legally be resold.) They can be held civilly liable for distributing false information and might also be in breach of their agreements with the agencies which give them access to the data.

The urgency with which this is required under the law depends on the use to which the data is being put. It's really important to keep data used in pre-employment reports up to date. Marketing data can generally be full of garbage.

This is all generally governed in the United States under the FCRA. It's not an area of the law that you're going to get comfortably familiar with in just an afternoon of reading.

Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?

#237

Post by [deleted] »

mehrdadn wrote: post #49
dsp1234 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a court needs to control someone's information surely they know who these people are and they can let them know? I think you have a misunderstanding of what a US court can do. A court can only tell a specific party to take some action, and generally only if that party is somehow related to the legal action (such as being a defendant). Generally, there is no judgement that a court can make that can effect unnamed part…

What about this though: >> Or when someone wants to start another one of the higher-level companies -- how do they know which core aggregators to buy from? If that's a secret then how would they find out?

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?

#238

Post by justin66 »

mehrdadn wrote: post #84
cosmie wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If that's a secret then how would they find out? You don't. I've worked in data acquisition in the past, both buying data and selling it. Sometimes as the original source of truth and sometimes as a middleman that does data cleaning, standardization, appending (from other sources), then selling the derived product downstream. Companies in that space guard their upstream sources quite heavily, because they don't wan…

+1 thanks for the explanation! And regarding this: > Edited to add: You're also asking a lot of people in here to name specific companies even if they can't give you huge lists. This space is super heavy on NDAs (and trigger happy on enforcing them). If you've actually worked in it, there's simply no way you're able to name drop legally. I understand that an NDA would prevent you from naming your own company or your…

Go to an industry site like www.napbs.com and look around.

Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?

#239

Post by justin66 »

TrinaryWorksToo wrote: post #93
dsp1234 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a court needs to control someone's information surely they know who these people are and they can let them know? I think you have a misunderstanding of what a US court can do. A court can only tell a specific party to take some action, and generally only if that party is somehow related to the legal action (such as being a defendant). Generally, there is no judgement that a court can make that can effect unnamed part…

What about class action? Could you make a class action against those who have sold your information?

It has successfully been done in the past, so yes, you could do that.

Re: Ask HN: Who really gives your personal info to Intelius, Instant Checkmate, etc?

#240

Post by justin66 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #43
LeoPanthera wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This Reddit comment suggests DeleteMe doesn't work so well. https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/3q0cfz/thinking_ab...

Quoting that comment: > Your information will show up on those sites sometimes - it'll pop back up after being removed. That suggests that they're not actually tracking down the sources, just poking the downstream sites that get data from those sources. Much less useful.

The sources include government agencies at the state, local, county, and federal level. Those agencies are not going to hide public documents with your name and address on them just because you ask them to.

There's a legal process to, for example, expunge a criminal record. On the other hand, most counties aren't going to seal the records associated with your house or other property you've bought just because you would like them to.

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